Does not look inside zip files. Does not analyze image files disguised by changing extension. In testing, missed many unmistakable porn images and flagged hundreds of innocent files as porn.

Bottom Line

Porn Terminator promises to wipe your system clean of porn images, videos, and more. In testing, though, it missed a lot of porn and flagged tons of innocent images.

When the relatives come to visit for the holidays, chances are some of them will ask to use your computer. Do you need to install parental control software to keep rowdy teens from abusing the connection to download inappropriate pictures? Well, that would be awkward. But once they've gone home you could clean up any impropriety using Porn Terminator. This product wipes your system clean of porn images, videos, and text files. It would be a very handy utility, if it worked better.

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Your $49.99 yearly subscription (currently available for $29.99) lets you install the product on three computers. At the end of the year, you can renew for $29.99 (currently $19.99) or pay $39.99 for a lifetime subscription. You can use it to ensure your own PC is clean, to clean up the children's PC, or to verify that your business PCs don't contain any porn.

The Porn Terminator website is bursting with superlatives and testimonials. It touts the company's "unique SkinScan algorithm" that detects porn using skin tones and curvature percentages. I've seen this kind of technology before, though, and it rarely works well.

The program's cheerful main window focuses on scanning your hard drive; if you have more than one, you'll have to scan each separately. Fortunately, you can save search results for processing at another time. I did note that the button for a custom search was actually titled Costum Search—that kind of sloppiness is a bad sign.

Hands On with Porn Terminator To get a feeling for how the product works, I loaded up a virtual machine test system with two dozen pornographic images downloaded from the Internet. I made sure to include a variety of skin tones, and to get images of both men and women. And I saved each using an innocuous name like nice_picture.jpg.

I noted the website promised that Porn Terminator would scan for porn images in zip files, and that it should detect porn even if someone changed the file's name or extension. To test this feature, I copied six of the images into a regular zip file and six more into an encrypted zip file. I renamed six JPGs to use the extensions TIF, RAW, or WMF; Windows has no trouble opening such disguised files even with the wrong extension. Finally, I used an image editing program to tweak the color balance in copies of the remaining six files.

Before launching a scan, I reviewed the configuration options. It turns out that detection of disguised files is off by default. I turned it on and clicked the button to scan all of the C: drive.

Disappointing Results Porn Terminator first collected stats on files needing examination and then proceeded to the analysis phase. It found about 140 images and finished scanning in less than three minutes.

The results were seriously disappointing. Porn Terminator detected just 16 of the 24 files, and also flagged two unrelated images, an alarm clock and a plate of brownies. That means it missed eight unprotected porn files and missed every single file that was disguised in any way.

I chose to delete all found files—note that Porn Terminator uses secure deletion, so there's no going back. Looking at the missed files, I found that the subjects of four had very dark skin and two had extremely pale skin. The remaining two contained multiple bodies overlapping. I surmise these images may have been too challenging for SkinScan.

I checked with my Porn Terminator contact, who confirmed that, despite the description on the website, the product does not actually search within zip files. As for the files disguised by changing their extension, I did find them listed on a page of disguised files, along with 60 other perfectly valid files used by Chrome, Firefox, and Java. Even though the program clearly identified my renamed samples as JPG files, it didn't bother to open them as such and check for porn. I deleted all of the disguised files without any apparent harm to Chrome or Firefox.

Given that SkinScan looks for actual skin tones, I wasn't at all surprised that it missed the images whose color balance I had tweaked to be more green or blue. That in itself doesn't worry me. I don't think there's a big market in porn images of green-skinned aliens.

Since I had just downloaded the sample pornographic images, I figured Porn Terminator would also flag the image URLs in its Internet page. However, it didn't find anything improper in the browser history, cookies, or temporary Internet files.

The scan also found three obscene text files. Porn_terminator_key.txt was flagged both for filename and content, since both contained the word porn. Two totally random Windows Error Reporting files contained the string BBW embedded in some kind of product code. Apparently some porn images of Big Beautiful Women get the tag BBW.

But wait. Maybe I didn't configure the scan properly? The configuration page includes a SkinScan Analysis slider with 13 settings, from 0.2 to 0.8. I changed from the default level of 0.35 to 0.5 and rescanned—it found nothing. I cranked it all the way up to 0.8 and again found nothing. Finally, I clicked the Costum [sic] Search button and chose Comprehensive scan, which "uses all available algorithms to detect the maximum number of questionable files." Once again, it found nothing.

Overwhelming False Positives To get a different view of the program, I ran it on my main PC, which contains 16 years of digital photos as well as quite a few videos. This scan examined over 75,000 files, and took just short of 90 minutes. And the results were…amazing?

The program identified over 1,300 images as "potentially objectionable." It flagged 33 images with a high SkinScan warning level, about 180 at the medium level, and the rest at low. Wow, I must be some kind of porn-hound, right? Well, no.

Of the 33 highly objectionable images, 26 were simply background textures for Photoshop and other image editing programs. These had no curves whatsoever, just patterns like bricks, wood, cloth, and so on. The non-background images included several pictures of family members (fully dressed!), a swallow nest, and a mine shaft. And yes, the word "shaft" in that last image's name got it flagged, as did "frank" in one of the family photos. I painfully flipped through all 1,300 images, 18 per page, and verified the utter absence of anything remotely pornographic.

The scan also identified 150 potentially objectionable videos, two at the high level and 20 at the medium level. Actual subjects included a chemistry magic show, my son feeding colorful lorikeets, and an antique music box. The two high-level warnings went to an innocuous animation project my daughter created in high school and a video of her and other girls playing Rock Band. You guessed it; both had "girl" in the title.

As for the text file search, it flagged files containing a wide variety of words. My Christmas card list contains entries for a couple friends named Dick, for example, and a bibliography of L. Frank Baum's Oz books contained the word "girl. Every document that mentioned clicking the mouse got zinged for "licking." Seriously!

Just Not Accurate Porn Terminator offers to search your hard drives and permanently wipe away any pornographic images, videos, text files, and more. It's a nice idea, but it didn't work well in testing. Porn Terminator missed fully one third of the sample porn images, failed to check inside zip files, and identified but didn't analyze JPG files with renamed extensions. It also flagged hundreds and hundreds of perfectly innocent images and videos as pornographic. Yes, it did detect some of the porn image samples, and that's good. But just because a scan comes up clean doesn't mean there aren't some porn images lurking.

So, next time the relatives are due to visit, consider temporarily installing an actual parental control system. Our Editors' Choice products in this area are ContentWatch Net Nanny 7 and Symantec Norton Family Premier, but you probably don't need more than Norton's free edition. Instead of cleaning up a smutty mess, keep the mess from happening in the first place.

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted by readers. By 1990, he had become PC Magazine's technical editor, and a coast-to-coast telecommuter. His "User to User" column supplied readers with tips...
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